This week marks the 30th anniversary of "Black July" – the state-sponsored pogroms unleashed on Tamils in Sri Lanka on 24 July 1983. Approximately 3,000 civilians were killed. I was 13 and living in the epicenter of the violence in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. Mobs roamed the city with electoral rolls to identify Tamil homes and businesses. Tamils who fell into the hands of the mobs were beaten, raped, or burned alive.

On the night they came for us my family and I escaped the worst thanks to our Sinhalese neighbours who, at great risk to themselves, gave us shelter in their home. We had not met these new neighbours before. They acted with compassion and courage not because they were our friends, but because to abandon us would have diminished them.

My family saw the writing on the wall after many days and nights hiding under beds and crouching behind curtains. We looked abroad for where we could live without fear. With relatives in Australia, capacity to apply for family reunion, and the means to purchase airline tickets that would take us to safety, we moved to Blacktown in the western suburbs of Sydney in 1984. Many Australians or their relatives and friends would share similar histories of displacement, expulsion, or simply a journey to a better life.

As an Australian reflecting on prime minister Rudd’s wager that banishing all boat migrants to Papua New Guinea will be electorally rewarding, I ask how such measures could be acceptable and popular in a nation of immigrants and refugees. What does the popularity of Rudd’s cruel plan say about the Australian psyche?

Freud would have said that Australians are engaged in a denial of their own identification with the migrant or refugee. Hidden behind their renowned confidence is a sense of shame and trauma that many Australians feel about being (or descending from) the unwanted, discarded, or expelled people of the world. In supporting Rudd’s scheme they are repressing their own sense of not belonging. This repression has now reached a level of psychotic destructiveness.

What would Freud have said about Rudd’s Regional Settlement Arrangement? In his 1925 essay on negation, Freud explained that when a patient rejects an association in a dream as untrue, this denial is usually a projection of what the dream is really about. The analyst would ask who the person in the dream might be. The patient responds, “it's not my mother”. Freud suggests we should amend this to mean: “so it is his mother”. We should interpret Rudd’s stated motivation for expelling boat migrants to PNG in a similar way.

Rudd associates boat migrants with criminal people traffickers. As he put it: “There is nothing compassionate about criminal operations which see children and families drowning at sea”. Rudd’s "negated association" here is with the criminal people trafficker. We should disregard his negation of them, for it is the hallmark of what Rudd is repressing. He is denying Australia’s own lack of compassion. It is using its relative wealth to expel a population that it is obliged to offer protection to under international law.

But more seriously than that – Rudd is repressing the fact that Australia is now a state that, just like people traffickers, disregards the harm it is about to inflict on many thousands of people.

Those arriving by boat seeking asylum are no longer treated as discernable persons, but as a population of "maritime arrivals" that can be discarded. Experience over the last century warns that when you treat persons as populations you can do whatever you want to them. Armenian, communist, homosexual, Jew, Kurd, Roma, or Palestinian – when a sovereign state ceases to address you as a person, you are likely to perish or be reduced to utter abjectness.

But my neighbours in Colombo and other chapters in history offer glimmers of hope too. This year also marks the 75th anniversary of the Kindertransports. In 1938, during the last months before Europe descended into war, around 10,000 Jewish children from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Poland were sent unaccompanied by their parents to Britain. Many of these children were the only ones in their families to survive the Holocaust. Trains brought them to London’s Liverpool Street Station from where they were dispersed to foster homes. Frank Meisler’s sculpture commemorating their journeys was unveiled at this station in 2006. The plaque thanks the people of Britain for their role in saving those children. It then quotes the Talmud: “Whosoever rescues a single soul is credited as though they had saved the whole world”.